Comment by MrDresden
12 hours ago
> "Too many android phones copied Apple and ditched the venerable audio jack"
I understand this is a personal preference, but I never understood the anger some people had over the removal when it's as easy as just using a small USB-C to 3.5mm audio jack converter to use wired headphones.
>when it's as easy as just using a small USB-C to 3.5mm audio jack converter to use wired headphones.
As someone who uses wired earphones exclusively and must use those USB-C adapters you suggest, it's not quite "just as easy" because there are several problems:
- it's an extra $10 dongle to buy and potentially lose. I've lost several of them over the years
- adds more mechanical stress to the USB-C jack. The office Apple USB-C 3.5mm adapter protrudes out from the phone and I've had several close calls with the wire getting snagged on a door knob which can damage the USB-C port. I've never been comfortable with this Rube-Goldberg dongle contraption that adds more risk to damaging a $1000 phone. It's a fear I never had with the built-in 3.5mm jack on my old iPhone 5. There are 3rd-party right-angle USB-C to 3.5mm on Amazon (including magnetic ones) but the ones I tried interfere with phone cases and they don't sound as good. (Apparently Apple uses a more premium DAC chip in their USB-C adapter.)
- can't simultaneously charge the phone while listening unless you buy a different USB-C adapter that has both 3.5mm input and a USB-C passthrough charging port. These are bulkier.
- it's an extra dongle that's easy to forget. I once got on a transatlantic flight and realized that I forgot my USB-C earphone adapter at home. I panicked and dreaded the idea of nothing to listen to for 8 hours but I was luckily saved by a friend that didn't need to use hers and let me borrow it. Why can't I just leave the USB-C dongle connected to the 3.5mm 100% of the time so there's nothing to forget?!? Because I often need to connect the earphones to things that don't need the adapter.
With all those drawbacks, I still use the USB-C adapters because I have to. But it has definitely made life more complicated.
Because that small audio jack converter cannot drive my wired headphones, so now it's not a small dongle but another smartphone-sized gadget with usually another rechargeable battery, and at that point I might as well use my laptop as portable music player.
And if you ever held e.g. Apple's adapter in your hand you'll know how incredibly flimsy its cable is, and how such adapters easily act as levers to mechanically strain the USB-C port. There's a reason headphone jacks are robust - they were actually designed for use with audio devices in mind.
Actually, no.
We know as a matter of fact that Android does NOT handle your audio properly when you transmit audio over USB-C then converter. It used to work fine with 3.5mm.
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/250602/how-to-di...
And you could run into weird issues like this
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/238773737/assis...
Which nobody needed to worry about.
You really cannot see? The experience is vastly inferior: the required dongles have a huge list of annoyances, and you either cannot charge at the same time or have to use an ever more finicky splitting dongle.
I tried the Apple one for a while but it’s badly shielded and picks up interference a lot. I mean really obvious buzzing sounds if near certain sources of RF. Switched to wired ear buds with a lightning connector and no interference issues. So I’m sad I can’t plug in my high quality headphones or hook up my phone to my mixer when I want without having noise.
I'm one of those person who were extremely pissed. I've stuck with older phones for a long time to avoid the thing.
The USB to Jack things are brittle and low quality. That's yet another stuff to not lose and carry around.
Jacks just work. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
I have bought probably two or three dozen different kinds of USB-C adaptors over the past few years, for old USB peripherals, for HDMI and display port, etc. They always last a few months then develop unreliable connectors and begin failing on any computer I try them with unless I baby the exact angle of the cable. There's something about USB-C that makes them particularly vulnerable to strain relief issues. Never had these kind of problems before with anything other than apple magsafe connectors. Certainly not from trusty old analogue jacks.
Curiously, I have had the exact opposite experience. Over the years I tried dozens of earbuds and headphones with a jack connection and all of them after a few months of use started getting unreliable connections unless I kept them at the right angle. The pair which lasted longer without issues costs around 180€ but still started showing problems after 2-3 years, though to be fair I left them almost always plugged in my pc. If I had used them with my phone I would've likely started experiencing connection issues much sooner.
The only other connection type I found to be even worse is microusb. I lost count over how many cables I had to change, some even after just a few months. On the other hand I neved had any problem with usb-c cables or peripherals.
Why would you want to carry around an additional dongle? It's just one more thing which you can forget and which can break.
If they replaced it with a second USB port, not simply removed the jack, there would be far fewer complaints.
Part of it is jack longevity. I've never had a headphone port die on me, but I have multiple old phones with dead lightning or USB-C ports...
I’ve had lots of them break. Sometimes the jack was only attached to the board via solder joints which eventually break from fatigue.
It's just one more thing to buy and lose. I know I own both Apple's lightning-to-3.5mm adapter and the USB-C-to-3.5mm. Right now, I know where my nice big-cans headphones are, but it's not with either adapter. I'm pretty such I know where my cheap wireless buds are. The lightning adapter should live in the same travel pouch, but I'm not 100% sure if it's there because I frequently use those with devices that have a 3.5mm jack, so they might have been separated. I know for a fact my USB-C-to-3.5mm adapter has been separated, and I've not seen it for over a year. I know it's in the house somewhere, so I certainly wouldn't buy another one (especially considering how infrequently I used it before), but I have no idea where it is and so if I did want to use my iPad with my nice headphones, I can't.
Contrast that to the simplicity with devices that still have a 3.5mm phone - my daily Android phone, my Macbook Air - I can just plug any old headphones in and not have to go searching for the adapter.
And despite the fact that I also own two bluetooth headphones, my wired big-cans headphones have far superior sound quality to either of them. I know it's not a fair comparison because they were well over $100 compared to $10 for the others, but I'm still limited to what I can use them with - which in my case is absolutely everything except my Apple kit (laptop excepted).
Can you charge the ohone while listening on the phone?
I have a splitter but it's pretty niche and probably not the best DAC
I've done that for years and it's a 'tax' for being allowed to use my actual headphones. Every single converter I've used will shit the bed after 6-12 months thanks to shitty cabling, and I've used both the official converters as well as third party ones. Eventually it becomes a fucking pain in the ass when it dies at an inconvenient time.
In comparison the headphones I've been using have lasted me for over 10+ years with no issue, and any decent high quality set of cans makes the 3.5mm cable easily replaceable.